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IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: The better AI gets at teaching itself to perform tasks in ways beyond the skills of mere humans, the more likely it is that it may unwittingly behave in ways a human would consider unethical. To explore ways to prevent this from happening, IBM researchers taught AI to play Pac-Man without ever gobbling up the ghosts. And it did so without ever explicitly telling the software that this was the goal. Over at Fast Company, I wrote about this project and what IBM learned from conducting it.
The researchers built a piece of software that could balance the AI's ratio of self-devised, aggressive game play to human-influenced ghost avoidance, and tried different settings to see how they affected its overall approach to the game. By doing so, they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them.
The researchers built a piece of software that could balance the AI's ratio of self-devised, aggressive game play to human-influenced ghost avoidance, and tried different settings to see how they affected its overall approach to the game. By doing so, they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them.
This is being made up to be something it's not. Just another example of how non-technical people might interpret technical work.
And just another example of using trendy buzzwords to get undeserved attention.
I don't think so. :*)
L'Idiot
Yea. Even sillier when you remember that Pac Man gets points for eating ghosts, exponent style. The ideal Pac Man eats four ghosts per power pellet, otherwise you are leaving points on the table. Because the game has a finite number lf levels, every abandoned ghost is a lower total score.
That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets in a sustainable way to pay for ghost shelters and outreach to better understand them and protect them.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it is. You might be able to create an AI that has some desirable characteristics based on human morality, but as soon as you make it compete against other AIs that don't possess those characteristics, it will either adapt to possess them itself in order to remain competitive or it will perish if it's been crippled in a way to prevent it from adjusting. A pacifistic Pac-Man AI might be novel, but if it was made to compete, it wouldn't do as well.
When the AI begins watching humans play Pac-Man, doing harm to the ghosts, it will consider humans a threat to ghosts and thus eliminate the humans to satisfy its directives. Is IBM's median employee age too young to have seen Robocop?
..all day long for weeks and weeks.
That's what the title should be.
"Pacifist" runs of games are popular with the speedrunning community. Depending on the game it might be an achievement to simply finish it without harming anything, or it may just be another category to get the fastest time in.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Title: "IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm"
Blurb: "they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them."
So companies will presumably use a similar method to design AIs that will maximize corporate profit with only a _small_ amount of acceptable human murdering in the process?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That's the point. There are plenty of real world cases where we could be more efficient if we simply disregarded moral and ethical concerns. One of the concerns with machine learning is that they may find an optimal solution that violates ethical considerations. The problem is even larger when you consider an AI finding locally optimal solutions disregarding externalities.
For a classic example, Ford once determined that paying off expected damages in wrongful death suits would be slightly cheaper than refitting existing Pintos to not explode.
The Pac-Man simulation is a very simplified version of a case where, due to ethical considerations it is necessary to avoid the locally optimal solution.
It's having an algorithm grind out a solution to playing the game which meets an additional constraints, which they tweak.
If they'd actually taught the AI ethics, the AI would construct the play constraints for itself starting from ethical principles. At full human levels of ethical self awareness, the AI would be chasing ghosts down the hall and then -- unprompted -- stop and ask itself, "What am I doing?"
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> The Pac-Man simulation is a very simplified version of a case where, due to ethical considerations it is necessary to avoid the locally optimal solution.
The Pac Man doesn't avoid any optimal solution. It simply defines optimum as not to include not touching ghosts - ghosts are bad. In the classic version of the game, touching a ghost is bad. Unless you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds. They trained the AIto NOT learn the "unless you've eaten a pellet". It just does "touching ghosts is bad".
There's nothing moral, or even interesting, about "in Pac-Man, touching ghosts is bad". Essentially, just one too stupid to know that Power Pellets do anything.
Even non-speedrunning gamers can find some real joy in pacifist runs. It's often far more challenging to not kill enemies than it is to just play the game as designed. It requires different strategies and skills, and often radically different gameplay.
I've replayed a fair number of games that way, just because it breathes new life into an old favorite.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets in a sustainable way to pay for ghost shelters and outreach to better understand them and protect them.
And PAC Pac Man doesn't disclose how many points he has and uses them to get the ghosts to do his bidding.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Meanwhile SuperPac Man just gobbles up all the points and uses them to lobby the game developer.
The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets
Not very many, b/c the Liberal Pac Man deliberately allows the ghosts to defeat pac man.
Once by Pinky, then Inky, and Clyde, in that order --- Blinky doesn't get a turn, b/c there are only 3 Pacman Lives, and Blinky has too much privilege.